Improving the Accuracy of the Diffusion Model in Highly Absorbing Media

The diffusion approximation of the Boltzmann transport equation is most commonly used for describing the photon propagation in turbid media. It produces satisfactory results in weakly absorbing and highly scattering media, but the accuracy lessens with the decreasing albedo. In this paper, we presented a method to improve the accuracy of the diffusion model in strongly absorbing media by adjusting the optical parameters. Genetic algorithm-based optimization tool is used to find the optimal optical parameters. The diffusion model behaves more closely to the physical model with the actual optical parameters substituted by the optimized optical parameters. The effectiveness of the proposed technique was demonstrated by the numerical experiments using the Monte Carlo simulation data as measurements

Multispectral Bioluminescence Tomography: Methodology and Simulation

Bioluminescent imaging has proven to be a valuable tool for monitoring physiological and pathological activities at cellular and molecular levels in living small animals. Using biological techniques, target cells can be tagged with reporters encoding several kinds of luciferase enzymes, which generate characteristic photons in a wide spectrum covering the infrared range. Part of the diffused light can reach the body surface of the small animal, be separated into several spectral bands using appropriate filters, and collected by a sensitive CCD camera. Here we present a bioluminescence tomography (BLT) method for a bioluminescent source reconstruction from multispectral data measured on the external surface, and demonstrate the advantages of multispectral BLT in a numerical study using a heterogeneous mouse chest phantom. The results show that the multispectral approach significantly improves the accuracy and stability of the BLT reconstruction even if the data are highly noisy